Ari Fitz’s New Series Takes a Closer Look at Getting Dressed

https://www.instagram.com/p/BXoZk7oBzzm/

Model/filmmaker/your wife since The Real World: Ex-plosion Ari Fitz regularly discusses race, gender, love, and more on her own YouTube channel, as well as producing sleek style series Tomboyish. But her latest project, 60 Second Fitz, is something new altogether.

The series is a hybrid of Fitz’s previous work, blending fashion, narrative, and questions of identity into a series of nutritious minute-long morsels. The combination of watching an objectively cool (fight me) person like Fitz assemble a killer outfit while earnestly parsing topics like the boxes queer people often find ourselves pushed into, the imbalances of power central to appropriation, and unlearning the sexualization of breasts and lesbian relationships is simultaneously jarring, swaggy (to borrow a phrase), and intimate. Fitz bares her skin and her soul equally — a nurturing antidote to the exclusionary, or at least vapid, approach generally associated with fashion and its people.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BV-HYibBCKj/

“Something that’s kind of dear to me is the way that I dress,” Fitz told Autostraddle in 2013. “Every morning I decide how I want to present that day, whether I want to be my hot andro butch style or if I want to be high femme that day. And I take a lot of pleasure and a lot of pride in being able to, I guess, kind of flow and not being stuck within one presentation.”

https://youtu.be/1-l1qkNaEbg?t=2m42s

Fitz broaches this very topic in the first installment of the eight-part project, of which she’s released four videos. New episodes will premiere Tuesdays and Saturdays; Fitz says audience feedback will determine the existence and exact shape of future seasons. Check it out on YouTube, and for access to extended episodes of the series with additional commentary, support Fitz’s work on Patreon.

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Nora

Nora is a writer and shoot producer living in Brooklyn. Send her links to weird clothing and dog videos to nora [at] autostraddle [dot] com.

Nora has written 52 articles for us.

4 Comments

  3. Excellent timing for this in my life. As a trans woman, I find it to hard to navigate presentation and “pick a side”. Some days I really want to wear my baggy cammo cargo pants with that feminine silk top and cute shoes. I get so tired of people saying, “That doesn’t match” or “You can’t wear that”.
    People seriously need to nibble on some rocky road and take a chill pill. My clothing choices shouldn’t affect other people this much.

  4. I relate so hard to the ego battering “pick a side” and “who would want to date someone that confused them”

    Dated someone wanted to push my presentation into a particular direction and for me to stick with it because to them my physical body and pretty face were more “suited” to that look than to the ones I preferred, it hurt

    It felt like a rejection of me, even tho I did not know how to define me or have a way to explain why that look made me so uncomfortable without being dismissed as lacking confidence in my physical appearance.
    What made it stomach churningly awful and insidious was the thread of well-meaning concern, reminders perception mattered, that looking like a “bulldyke” was dishonest of me and confusing.

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